A Lion Among Men Quotes
"The time came for her to die, and she would not die; so perhaps she might waste away, they thought, and she did waste, but not away."
"God love her, they said, in bitter, unconvincing voices—or perhaps they meant May the Unnamed God love her, our unrepentant sister Yackle, for we certainly can’t."
"I want to go to hell in a handbasket. Put me out of my misery and into the Afterlife where I can do some real damage, damn it."
"We start out in identical perfection: bright, reflective, full of sun. The accident of our lives bruises us into dirty individuality. We meet with grief. Our character dulls and tarnishes. We meet with guilt."
"The mood of the season. Pray for peace but hide your wallets and your wives, and send your children away if you can."
"Remember to breathe. It is, after all, the secret of life."
"Sometimes I recall oddments without even trying."
"Life is unpredictable. I don’t imagine we’ll meet again, but who knows."
"Ozma is not dead. But you bring us no news of our lost Oz—you break the contract. You will pay."
"Nothing in the life of the Bears had changed since he could remember."
"The Ozmists were everywhere and could apprehend the faintest whisper."
"Language is always changing, they say: ever new. Refreshing itself—"
"This is what it feels like to be a piece of shit, thought Brrr; being pummeled on all sides by the world."
"We never get tired of them," said Cubbins, "Because we forget them as soon as we finish them."
"You can’t tell the difference between a military garrison and a market town, you’ve got a screw loose, I fear."
"If even the ghost of the past can harbor a motivation to dissemble, where can any ignorant Lion sensibly place his trust?"
"Perhaps lying down and playing dead, as Cubbins should have done with the Ozmists, was the only legitimate response to the villainy of life."
"The thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others."
"My breasts pointed at my toes. I wriggled my toes and I tried to wriggle my breasts."
"Old granny vigor mortis was listening so cannily."
"Those who don’t have a name can’t remember it, can they?"
"I examined the crow’s feet on either side of a spinster’s face."
"I was already well on my way to bodily corruption, you see."
"I thought you said it was Madame Morrible’s connections you were tracking down."
"He was playing with fire, but what was there left to lose?"
"I don’t have the stomach for shopping today."
"The whole town is waiting to see if they start to riot."
"They’ll show those Glikkuns the business end of a blunderbuss."
"I don’t have to answer your nosy questions. I’m done auditioning for you."
"All that misty apprehension, those swirls of image trying to form into something intelligible…in all that, I perceived force and hope alike."
"I’m not a poet, and despite my profession I’m not particularly good at description."
"The taste burned and stank, and I felt the liquor in my eyes stew."
"How different his life might have been if he had emerged from the Great Gillikin Forest right at the outskirts of the town of Tenniken instead of at Traum."
"The Cowardly Lion? Sure, it sounded like a slur of sorts, but he’d looked on it as almost a kind of stage name, a title."
"But remembering what had happened in Traum—even thinking about it today—had been a mistake."
"We all make mistakes. But we’re not supposed to profit from them."
"The soirées became ugly but he kept showing up, in part to prove he wasn’t scared to show up."
"The Lion who wouldn’t fight. The pesky Glikkuns who were mowed down. The big old peaceable pussycat."
"I had never met Nessarose or Shell. And that Elphaba—that green girl!—well, we know what happened to her."
"I had been waiting for something to focus my attention. I needed to find something in order to sense a meaning to my life."
"A male usually had made up his mind before you began to talk to him—so why bother?"
"A female, because her mind was more supple, was always prepared to become more disappointed in you than she had yet suspected possible."
"My invalid master professed that in exchange for chores I could perform, I could barter for my freedom."
"I have no plans but to keep out of sight. I merely worry at the thought of armies massing around us."
"The Clock spells out its designs of fate only as far as it wants me to know them."
"I merely worry at the thought of armies massing around us."
"Armies are only hunters in formation. Upright teams of precision hunters."
"I actually had a profile in Shiz once—of a sort."
"I once got a medal from the Wizard of Oz himself."
"Times weren’t better, they were just—different."
"Carrying a letter of assurance, Brrr traveled back to Munchkinland."
"He understood at once that he had undersold himself as to the percentage of his own fee."
"He was worth it. Without his skill at negotiation and his nerve, the Animals back in Stonespar End would be getting nothing."
"The pelt of a tiger was draped across the piano."
"He paid off old debts involving Ampleton Quarters, and he invested shrewdly in the less gaudy of Hiiri Furkenstael’s gilded engravings."
"Sleep did not come back. All that unintended testimony he delivered to himself, at Yackle’s canny questions, had brought Muhlama back into his catalog of defeats."
"He was another pawn in another campaign, and hadn’t sussed out yet what her angle was."
"He was a hollow in the midst of his own life."
"She who didn’t seem able to die believed in death, as an article of faith—the only article of faith, and out of her reach!"
"He tried to escape those memories that had crowded upon him this past hour: his disastrous incompatibility with clans either Animal or human."
"I am thinking about whether to say any more to you at all."
"He rolled over on his side, unwilling to look and see if Shadowpuppet had witnessed his midnight indiscretions."
"Maybe being in the wrong place at the wrong time seemed to be that unlucky scalawag’s single occupation in life."
"I can smell a lie, but I can no longer see the truth right in front of my face."
"The blind see history in a different way than the sighted."
"To end my long career in a last bout of usefulness."